Frozen moments in the interior stadium: style in contemporary 'proseball'.

Abstract

Writing about baseball has never been so popular as it is presently, causing one scholar to refer to "the current boom" in publishing. Most of the analysis of this body of work has centered on novels, but it is apparent that other forms of baseball writing are rhetorically as interesting as fiction. After summarizing some of the major critical works on baseball fiction, this study seeks to rectify certain omissions in the field of what Donald Hall calls "proseball." Included in this dissertation are studies of three player-autobiographies: Ted Williams' My Turn at Bat, Jim Brosnan's The Long Season, and Jim Bouton's Ball Four, in chapter two. Also covered, in chapter three, are essays by Roger Angell, John Updike, and Jonathan Schwartz, focusing on what Schwartz calls "frozen moments" in what Angell calls "the interior stadium." Chapter four provides an analysis of Don DeLillo's recent postmodern novella, Pafko at the Wall. Throughout, A. Bartlett Giamatti's connection of baseball with Romance Epics in his essay "Baseball as Narrative" is used to trace baseball's relationship with the rhetorical process.